95% of your buyers can't be sold to today. So why advertise?

Here's a fact that upends how most people think about marketing: at any given moment, only about 5% of potential buyers are actually in the market to buy your product. The other 95% aren't shopping at all — they're happy with what they have, locked into a contract, or simply not thinking about you. This is the 95-5 rule, popularized by Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute through LinkedIn's B2B Institute.

This explains a puzzle that frustrates founders: why pour money into ads when most viewers don't buy? The answer is mental availability — being the brand a buyer thinks of first when they do enter the market, which might be months or years later. Advertising to the 95% isn't wasted; it's planting a memory that pays off on a delay.

It reframes the classic split between two jobs. Lead-generation marketing (discounts, demos, 'buy now') targets the 5% ready today and shows quick returns. Brand-building targets the 95% for tomorrow — it looks inefficient on this quarter's dashboard but fills the pipeline for years to come. Cut it entirely and you slowly become invisible to future buyers.